Creative Life

Month: November 2017

Colour is central to our lives. As artists we have active control of colour to communicate with our viewers. There are observable ways colours interact to express our tastes and feelings. As we create we explore the feelings, the stories the colour helps us to tell. We can purposely go against our taste, in order to provoke or flow with it in order to placate or the third option is to downplay colour by going black and white. Knowing how they play together gives you freedom of choice.

This part is 3mins 10 secs the whole piece is 48 minute or so… I love the whole piece because of it emotional range and it’s story. The piece was writen in a concentration camp for POWs in France during WWII. for the only 4 instruments available – piano, violin, cello and clarinet. It was first played to prisoner in January 1942 on a very cold day. To me it’s classical punk because of it’s use of rhythm, chord and dischords and melody to represent the emotions of the prisoners and the spirit needed to survive the horror of the place it was written. This first part is just beautiful birds singing and yet has a lot of tension in it. I will come back to this piece again and again. I learn so much from this and there is more to learn.

For this I was inspired by Messiaen’s own writing about this movement – “Between three and four in the morning, the awakening of birds: a solo blackbird or nightingale improvises, surrounded by a shimmer of sound, by a halo of trills lost very high in the trees. Transpose this onto a religious plane and you have the harmonious silence of Heaven”

It’s for a poem “who will I be” about the anxiety I face meeting other men. It was inspired by women talking about their feelings when meeting strangers, specifically men. The thing that is scary and that seems overlooked is that actually the vast majority of men in the west (at least) are very polite to women they don’t know and that women should be more worried about men they know, than strangers. While for men violence is more likely to come from strangers. In both cases alcohol is most likely to be involved, though ‘Ice’ seems to be becoming a more common contributor, but still no where near as dangerous as alcohol or as expensive to our economy. Interestingly most of the other illegal drugs only contribute to violence as a result of their illegality, because it pushes people to associate with criminals.

The majority of violence in the world is between men. It doesn’t get reported because it is so natural as to be invisible. It only gets noticed when the violence is “dishonourable” that is an ambush punch, or the victim is considered weaker. This is the same source of the shaming that goes on with domestic violence and rape. The other types of violence, or maybe part of violence that gets notices is when there is no consent. “Combatants”, that is soldiers, are consenting participants in violence while “civilian” men, and automatically children and women haven’t consented to participate in the “war”, the most extreme violence. This is a common theme of my poetry, and other writing. There will be more on this site.

This is the product of a carterie project “Village” all participants use the same set of recycled materials but each came up witht heir own designs even if they had to be helped with the making.

Today thanks to St George TAFE School of Fine Arts and especially Thanks to Chris Casali a group of us got an intro to an amazing and beautiful project that acknowledges that being in hospital is tough and that art can help.

Arterie@RPA uses art therapy and art projects to help at least distract people from difficulties of their discomforts, pain and powerlessness of being in hospital. They do this in a number of ways.

The art is used both to provide direct therapy in the sense of art helping people with their healing process. For example helping stroke victims with redeveloping fine motor coordination. Or to help re-establish (or slow the deterioration of) thinking and problem solving from acquire brain injuries, dementia and stroke.

Then they have Artists in Residence (AIR) who do art on the walls and share their process in public for three weeks. This helps break up the boredom, providing interesting experiences for patients, carers, family and staff. And a beautiful environment for everyone including staff.

There are the travelling art helpers as part of “Carterie”. Volunteers and paid staff take carts around with art supplies and a variety of themes and materials that spark conversations and collaborations that also distract, but also help patients and carers manage the stress of the hospital life.

There are workshops in a central area for patients, carers and staff that basically allow them to socialise and feel empowered and supported emotionally. Some also help people to communicate across the whole range social backgrounds.

These are 10cm square canvases done with a limited colour pallet, participants could do whatever designs pleased them. The colours allowed them to fit together beautifully.

This project and its processes is such a beautiful modern and advanced health practice. It acknowledges the importance of mind in the healing process in away that goes beyond older ideas of psychology as separate to physiology, as individuals being separate to their environment.

On this visit we were given presentations by staff of the information above, then we were taken on a tour around the hospital showing displays of the results of various Artists In Residence projects and some of the carterie collaborations with patients and carers. Then we participated in a project to create 150 canvas tiles to decorate a rehab exercise area in blue, green aqua and white.